Intel pentium: history of the next processor to 486

Intel can fearlessly affirm that it is one of the parents of the modern processor and especially with its classic Intel Pentium. With a history that begins in the late sixties and continues to this day, the blue giant has been involved in many of the key moments in this industry.

However, it would not be until the mid-1990s when a name would begin to form among the general consumer; an event that has a lot to do with Intel Pentium processors. Today we want to talk about the origin and characteristics of these well-known processors.

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Intel Pentium: processors with their own name

Until the launch of the first Intel Pentium in 1993, those at Mountain View had used technical nomenclature or abbreviations to name most of their processors. This fact had been taken advantage of by the multiple companies that manufactured compatible hardware to "match" Intel's proposals.

Image: Flickr; Mark Sze

An example would be AMD's Am486 series, or the IBM 80486 DX. Both refer to its compatibility with the original Intel 80486 using the name of the same processor.

Intel could not register a number as a trademark, but an invented word. This is where the brand's “Pentium” comes from, referring to its fifth generation of x86 family processors and the Greek word for number five. With a registered proper name, identifying Intel processors was easier for the consumer and the marketing derived from this situation much more fluid.

The original Pentium began development two years after the launch of the Intel 80486 and was slated for release in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, the inclusion of some of the key elements of the processor ended up delaying its development, which was somewhat turbulent until its launch in mid-1993.

The big news in P5 processors

The Intel Pentium was the natural successor to the i486; It shared several features with its predecessor while presenting interesting improvements, such as the 64-bit upload on the data bus (compared to the 32-bit of the i486), or the appearance of superscalar architecture; The latter was especially significant, since it allowed two pipelines to complete several instructions for each cycle of the clock. It was a huge advance for x86 processors.

Image: wikimedia commons; Abaloosa

Due to these improvements, the Intel Pentiums worked faster than their predecessors even at lower frequencies. The first models of these processors were launched on the market at 60MHz and 66 MHz, although they would increase to 200 MHz in the last iterations of the generation. One of the most popular variations was the Intel Pentium MMX, from that same year, for including improvements to the instruction set and the execution of these (through the pipeline and the predictor).

However, despite the delays, the Intel Pentiums were not without controversy. One of the most discussed were the improvements in the floating point unit, which caused a bug (FDIV Bug) that constantly modified the results of some operations and questioned the utility of the Pentium in complex mathematical operations; although some flatter problems also stand out, such as the increase in voltage and temperatures with respect to past models. Intel had to contend with these errors over the years.

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The creation and expansion of Intel Inside

Despite the problems during its launch, the Pentium brand ended up being strengthened thanks to the media exposure and the efforts of the Mountain View company to correct these errors.

The identifying seal has been maintained until today.

The result was the creation of the Intel Inside seal from which we can still see derivatives today; This seal, together with Microsoft's constant collaboration in creating software compatible with its processors, helped Intel position itself among consumers and companies as a committed and decisive brand.

It would also be during these years when the company began to develop independent motherboards of the big manufacturers for its processors, the objective behind it was to stop depending on big brands to launch computers with their products.

Due to its gradual expansion and increasing prominence, at the launch of the original Intel Pentium (and its MMX variant) new additions had to be added, such as the Intel Celeron in the immediately lower range of the company, or the Pentium OverDrive, thought to be compatible with equipment based on Intel 80486 processors. Through all these actions, Intel positioned itself in all possible spectrums on the market, establishing its name, and that of Pentium, among the collective imagination of consumers.

Intel Pentium Pro: the basis of future Core 2 Duo

Image: Flickr; NicoNico

Upon good reception of the original Pentiums, Intel would begin developing the architecture that would accompany the next generation of x86 processors: the P6 architecture. This would be far more far-reaching than the company might have originally thought, even serving as the basis for the Core 2 Duo almost ten years after its development.

The first physical embodiment of this architecture was the Pentium Pro, launched in late 1995. The initial intention behind the Pentium Pro was to replace the original model in the high-end processor, this would end up doing the MMX variant of the original Pentium, relegating the Pentium Pro to the scientific and research sector. There it found its space as the main processor for supercomputers like ASCI Red, in its dual-core variant.

P6 processor architecture. Image: cmu

The P6 architecture was developed to be as efficient as possible when executing specific instruction sets. It achieved this through the translation of instructions in parallelizable micro operations and its predictor. The P6 architecture had an excellent IPC and a low level of consumption; It would serve as the basis for the subsequent Pentium II and III, before the release of NetBurst in Pentium 4 and the enormous changes that this meant.

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The legacy of the original Intel Pentium

From 1993 to 1999 Intel continued to produce Pentium processors in some of their original versions. Giving their processors their own name was an excellent move; It gave the necessary strength to the products of the blue giant to begin to differentiate itself efficiently from its competition and see the company's processors as an entity united with Intel itself.

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So much is the power of this name, that the company has not wanted to get rid of it over the years and even today it continues to launch processors under the Pentium brand, this time, yes, without the privilege of being the best it has to offer the North American company.